Monthly Challenge Solution: September 2026

We've successfully wrapped up another challenge. ☕Thank you everyone who participated. We have shared our workflow with you in the KNIME Community Hub as well. Check out our solution here:

We will announce the winner soon and a new challenge will be shared with you all this Monday!

Solution Summary: We start by reading the USDA coffee dataset. Then a Pivot node reshapes into one column per attribute, so that production, imports, exports, domestic consumption, total supply, and total distribution sit side by side for each country and year. A Row Filter node filters the data to the last ten years (2017-2026) and removes countries with zero supply as well as years without data. Then, a GroupBy node calculates the 10-years average for each country and a Column Renamer node cleans up the aggregation column names. Two Expression nodes then do the analytical work: the first calculates the four metrics (PSR, IDR, EIR, DCS) and the second applies our own fixed-cutoff rules to assign each country one of the three trade profiles — Pure Producer, Pure Consumer, or Trade Hub — or leaves it unclassified if it fits none of them. Everything is passed into one component that builds the interactive composite view: in the top part, a GroupBy, RowID, Table Column to Variable and Variable Expression node turn the profile counts into colored flow variables that four Text View nodes display as counters. In the bottom part a Value Selection Widget node fed by a Table Creator lets the user pick a profile. A Row Filter node keeps only the countries of that profile, and a Table View node lists them together with their four metrics.

If you'd like to dive deeper into our solution, you can find a full detailed breakdown in the workflow.